[LEAPSECS] The mystery of the missing leapseconds

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Sat Apr 30 18:25:10 EDT 2016


This is a very interesting piece of research:

	http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/4/e1501693.abstract

His primary claim is that melting ice has caused the earths
axis to change, which is major news indeed.

His secondary claim, which is where it gets on topic for us, is
that most of, possibly all, the decadal variability in Earth
Orientation is due to water transport, for instance the major shifts
of water which El Nino causes.

I asked him the obvious question (on twitter):

	"Any chance this also explains "the missing leap seconds" ('98-'05) ?"

to which he replied:

	"I am not sure about that!"

Which sounds like there could be another article in his data.

If we are _really_ lucky, there is a way to improve prediction of
future leap-seconds in that.

It will be interesting to see if this El Nino also causes a pause.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


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